Bouncing Forward

I think I’m a cup half full person. I can’t decide when that came to be true, because it wasn’t always so. But I think I definitely am. It was possibly started by my bosses in my second ‘real’ job after university. No problems, just challenges; no bad days, just ones that could have been better if… So cup half full can be learned, i think. And maybe I learned life was more fun, and there were infinitely more possibilities, if that was usually true.

Sometimes seeing that half-full cup can be more difficult than others. I’ve had a couple of moments over the past few months when it felt like the contents of my cup might get chucked down the sink. Not many. But they were definitely moments that felt like they were imposed on me rather than ones that just happened [though I’m sure it wasn’t intended to be that way].

But when the unexpected and unplanned happens, we usually have a few questions to ask ourselves. Sometimes the least useful one is ‘how did we get here?‘ and the most useful one is ‘ok, what now?‘ And decisions have to be made on what you’re trying to achieve. Are you trying to bounce back to the state of play before the event, or bounce forward to a new state? Are there limitations on what you can recover? Are there opportunities created by the new reality?

These are questions I probably ask more than most in a non-personal context, but now I find I’m applying them to myself. But whatever the context I have to confess that, in the same way I’m an advocate of the ‘half-full’ approach, I’m also a ‘bounce-forward’ type.

It’s like that cliche. If you think you’ve accidentally been given a lemon, when you were hoping for a banana, you might as well make lemonade. Probably. I mean lemonade is good and all but, perhaps, just perhaps, we should ditch the lemonade idea and go for a full on lemon drizzle cake, complete with little rivers of thin, citrusy-sweet icing.

What do you think?

p.s. The recipe link above is pretty good, though I prefer no filling in the middle…

* Edit in November 2010: See that ‘Bounce Forward’ logo? Yep, that’s a company logo that I created before most people knew I was leaving my job! This post was all about that, but I couldn’t say anything about the fact this was going on because I was honouring my employer!